So Sassy

I was in the bathroom today thinking about Sassy Magazine. You all remember Sassy Magazine, don’t you? Kind of like a hard-edge Seventeen? Anyway, when I was a sassy teen I had a sassy subscription to Sassy, mainly because I think my mother liked to say “You got your Sassy in the mail, Miss Sassy.” She liked to make that “sss” sound.

Anyway, I was remembering a certain regular column they had in this magazine. It was a kind of “write in and tell me your problems” feature. It didn’t cover the “I have an eating disorder and my baby daddy won’t give me no child support” problems, it mainly handled the “I don’t know how to french roll my jeans!” problems. At one point in this ever-useful discourse I recall some girl writing in and complaining about how embarrassing it was when she went to the bathroom at her high school and her pee was really loud- she wanted to know if the crackerjack staff at Sassy had any suggestions to tone it down. They did, OF COURSE, and they promptly replied that this Little Miss Thing should put a little bit of toilet paper in the bowl before she peed, thereby muting the noise and saving all that unwanted teen angst for local Nirvana copy-cat shows. Ingenious! I can only imagine the hours of work those well-paid New York magazine gals spent testing out little squares of T.P.

Right- this is where it gets funny, and explains why I was thinking about this on the toity this morning. In a subsequent issue of Sassy there was a letter to this same column that said, basically, “Omigod, I cannot believe that this magazine that so often talks about conserving the environment and stuff would actually suggest that people waste paper like this, just because they’re a little embarrassed! What about the earth, man!” And once again, the crackerjack Sassy staff responded with the kind of backpedaling that would make a circus monkey on a unicycle proud. “You are so right- we always need to consider the environment. Let’s think about the consequences of a little bit of embarrassment over hundreds of trees.”

So, as I was spinning the toilet paper roll round and round this morning, I thought about our environment, and I thought of Sassy. I wondered if any of my old Sassy copies that went promptly to the trash can on my eighteenth birthday had become this toilet paper; I wondered if I was wiping my ass with their advice.